Would you cut the mudguards on a Ferrari?
There’s a feeling amongst exotic car collectors that originality is king! But for nearly two decades, Marco Casciani, the owner of RACE! In Midrand, has been conducting major visual upgrades on all manner of exotic cars and motorcycles. We interviewed him at a recent summer celebration at his premises, which included a special presentation by luxury watch dealers STOPWATCH.
Putting your Ferrari under the knife
Would you cut off the mudguards of a brand-new Ferrari 812 Superfast, so that you could apply even wider ones? Imagine that moment of truth as you apply the first cut to lovingly hand-crafted Maranello metal, hoping, praying, that you have read the instructions correctly, measured accurately to within a few microns...
And telling yourself that, hey it’s just another car, this could be a common-or-garden Kia panel replacement, it’s simple if you adhere to basic principles. Yeah, right!
We suspect the technician that made that first cut on a brand-spanking new Ferrari 812 Superfast at the RACE! workshops in Barbeque Downs, Midrand, had more than few beads of sweat on this brow. To fit a Novitec wide-body kit to an 812 Superfast is easier when it comes to the front fenders, as it is more of a panel-replacement job. But at the rear, the fenders had to be cut at a very specific angle to apply the Novitec extended fenders. The new carbon-composite panels then had to be bonded in place using special aircraft-spec bonding agents, as per the Novitc specifications.
Suffice to say that it all turned out hunky dory. The owner of the front-engined Ferrari supercar had delivered it to RACE! with zero kilometres on the odometer, and here it was making its public debut this Saturday past, at a special celebration known as Watches and Wheels. Local collectable watch company TOPWATCH had combined with RACE! to put on an exhibition of super-collectable watches and cars, and needless to say, the Novitec wide-body Ferrari 812 Superfast N Largo took pride of place.
This Ferrari was one of over 1 000 exotic cars and motorcycles that RACE has modified over the past two decades. Many of those cars have had very mild custom jobs applied, amounting to not much more than a set of special wheels. But many of them are radical, and at Watches and Wheels we took an opportunity to interview the owner of RACE!, Marco Casciani.
In Marco's words:
AutoTrader: Marco, you got into this business via your motorcycle involvement?
Marco Casciani: That’s right. I raced motorcycles semi-professionally in South Africa and raced professionally in Italy for almost 10 years. Through my Italian contacts, I developed a business here in South Africa in my off-season, building special bikes for the rich and famous .
When I was building these high-end bikes I was building them mainly for the super-wealthy of Johannesburg, concentrating mainly on Ducatis. The evolution of that was, when you are building a R1-million-plus bike, you have to appreciate what level of cars these guys owned, to be able to spend that kind of money on a motorcycle.
The real break for me came in 2008 with the Ferrari 599. Novitec had just arrived on the scene. They famously started supercharging the Ferrari 430. That evolved to tuning programs with the 599 and I then began with a whole run of special Ferrari 599 builds.
AutoTrader: How did you make that initial connection with Novitec?
MC: It was driven by my client. He told me wanted a Novitec 599, he said I was so good with my hands, I had built him such amazing bikes, so he wanted me to put his car together, with the same attention to detail. And it was a no-brainer. The scale of the car was so easy, compared to building specialised bikes on such a compact scale. It was ridiculous. It was like one car, two cars, now we are in the thousands of cars!
AutoTrader: That’s a huge number.
MC: If you just walk the property, there are about 25 of our special builds here today. And when you consider that in South Africa we represent all the top global tuning brands: TechArt, Brabus, Novitec, ADV.1, Mansory the list goes on and on and it’s been a really progressive, organic evolution. Build one car, build two, the guy’s got a Ferrari, his wife’s got a little Porsche, they then think to themselves, aah, TechArt, let’s put some of that gear on that. Hmm we use a G-Wagon to take the kids on holiday, let’s put some Brabus kit on that car!
Then, his friends see his car, the answer is, go to Marco and he’ll make your car nice, and it’s just been totally, totally organic.
AutoTrader: What about traditional marketing?
MC: We’ve done our share of marketing. We have also given a lot of youngsters in the electronic media game a break with their websites. And what has evolved is, we have had so many middle-aged wealthy adults come into the shop and tell me, ‘my son has shown me a picture of this car on his phone: Can you do something like that for me?’
AutoTrader: There’s a general perception that, when dealing with such exotic machinery as you do, if you change it from standard, the value will drop. Isn’t there a big fear that when it comes to selling the car, that you have hurt the collectability of the car?
MC: It’s a beautiful question, and my answer is incredibly well-prepared because I’ve gone through it so many times. This is a question that has been repeated many times, especially on the Liberty Walk models we have done, which have an aggressive cut. But our business is not about cutting. It’s all about the value you put in the car.
Take Novitec. Novitec conversions are limited, the finished car is numbered, and the prices reflect that. On a Liberty Walk conversion this isn’t always the case, it is too widely available, and we don’t push the product too hard because only a very particular person enjoys it.
But with the Novitec N Largo, the Ferrari build we have here today, it’s almost impossible for anyone not to appreciate it, because of the integration of the design. It has an integrated carbon body. The 812 N Largo is totally integrated in a visual sense too, the wide body is not visually bonded on with screws! The softness of the conversion means that it could be a factory special edition. On the other end of the scale, a Liberty Walk build is radical, for the guy who wants a GT3 race car on the road!
There’s a collectable history to all this too. This is what a company like Koenig in Germany was doing 30 years ago. Somebody recently sent me pictures of a Koenig, telling me I am not the first guy to be doing this!
AutoTrader: We interviewed Willie Koenig for AutoTrader at the 2017 Frankfurt Show. That car was a 1980s Ferrari 512 BB.
MC: That’s it! And the Ferrari factory actually picked up on some of Koenig’s design cues. It’s funny, as tuners we often pre-empt what manufacturers are doing. We have been doing black-out kits for special cars for 15 years. Today you can walk into a BMW dealer and option a black-out kit to de-chrome your car. You know, the OEM community snubs the tuners, but the tuning community has such inertia today that it can also drive OEM trends.
For example, the 2020 RS6 Audi runs on 22-inch wheels from the factory. Why? Because the factory realises, wait a minute, those are sales that we could be generating!
AutoTrader: At the other end of the spectrum is that Audi wagon you have on show today. Tell us about the thinking behind that car!
MC: That was for a very eccentric owner. He came to us with a theme, he knew what he wanted, a wide body with a military theme. We brought his vision to a tactile reality. It is not for everybody. But most of my style of building is much more understated. Typically we soften a car, and even regarding our own branding, we put a matt black badge on a gloss black car. Very subtle.
AutoTrader: So will you sometimes advise a customer to tone down their visions?
MC: Every day! Our biggest task is often bridging the gap between vision and reality. A guy wants 26-inch wheels on his car, hopping down the street, because he’s seen one like that on TV. How do I build that? The dream is a 26-inch wheel, we shift it all the way down to a 22-inch, because he may want to consider potholes. On a Liberty Walk, visual appeal is big, the ride quality is not bad, but the clearance over speed bumps is a problem. So we balance the dream with practicality.
AutoTrader: Do you have customers bringing their cars back to you, that RACE ! have modified, for re-sale?
MC: One hundred per cent. Half of the cars you see on our floor are specialist cars that customers have had built, that they want us to sell. Because when they take a post-built car to a Mercedes dealer, for example, it gets snubbed. The OEM dealers say, we don’t have clients for a car like this, and it’s total rubbish. We do a trade on it, we market it, we move the product!
AutoTrader: Price wise, what’s the least expensive build you would do, and the most expensive?
MC: I think the most basic thing we do on a daily level is to fit nice wheels. Starting base on an M3, M4 or a Golf R, is about 50 grand for our level of wheels and top-quality tyres. Probably the most expensive car we’ve built today is the car that’s here today, the Ferrari 812 Novitec N Largo. That specific car was a special 812, probably a R10-million car, and the build was around R2,5-million. It’s car Number 11 of a build limited to 11 by Novitec! But we have done very many builds in the R1-million-plus category, and a few in the R2-million-plus range.
Currently, we are the South African agents for over 10 specialist high-end brands, and we have been in these premises, just down the road from Kyalami, since 2008.
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